I’m sure that you couldn’t make this up could you? Anyway the Merchant Navy are using Britney Spears’ music to deter Somali sea Pirates. If the pirates fail to heed the warnings from security on board merchant ships off the African coast and continue to head towards them then Plan B is invoked. Or perhaps that should be Plan Britney. They pump out Britney’s biggest hits at full volume and miraculously the pirates usually turn away.

Being a Bowie fan I came across Lou Reed after Mr Bowie mentioned him often in interviews and then went on to produce ‘Transformer’ along with Mick Ronson. Lou has always in my opinion been very much his own man and often refused to play the music industry game. Personally I think he should be commended for that.

Brian Eno once said ‘The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band’ to try to describe the wide influence that Lou Reed had on many fellow musicians. My thoughts go to Lou’s wife Laurie Anderson, his family, friends and fans. RIP Lou Reed you will be greatly missed.

Did you know that there are four winners of acting Oscars who have also had UK number one singles? No nor did I until I chanced upon the quiz in this weeks NME. Those four clever people and their UK number ones are;

Frank Sinatra won the best supporting actor Oscar for his role in 1954’s ‘From Here To Eternity’

Lee Marvin won the best actor Oscar for his part in the 1965 film ‘Cat Ballou‘

Lee’s only UK number one was “Wandrin’ Star” which was taken from the soundtrack of ‘Paint Your Wagon’ in 1970. The B side was another actor not famed for his singing, Clint Eastwood with “I Talk To The Trees”

This is apparently the 666th post on this blog, so I thought I’d celebrate that with devilishly beastly top 13 Satan songs. I’d also love to hear what other songs you might have chosen. Given that we are days away from Halloween I suppose that this borders on being a topical post too 🙂

According to a recent article on the BBC Entertainment News website there was almost a sequel to the very successful Disney ‘Mary Poppins‘ film from 1964. It would once again have been based on the books by Pamela Travers. It would have been called ‘Mary Poppins Comes Back’. In fact a screenplay was written by Brian Sibley and Pamela Travers. By this time it was 1984 and therefore casting anyone from the original film would have been difficult. Julie Andrews had moved on to many other things and she was also twenty years older.

No more Jesus juice please!

There would have been not Bert in the sequel; that was the character played by Dick Van Dyke in the original. However there was a part for Bert’s brother who was to be an Edwardian ice cream seller in a London Park. Given that Dick Van Dyke probably gave us the worst cockney accent in cinema history who do you think some Disney executives were considering to play his brother in the ill-fated sequel? None other than Michael Jackson! can you believe that? Would that have changed Jacko’s self-appointed title to the King Of Poppins? Anyway if you would like to read the whole story on the BBC click here.

So finally after a few false starts Stephen Morrissey has published his autobiography wich is either very cleverly or very lazily (depending on your opinion) titled ‘Autobiography’. Most of the reviews have been reasonably good, perhaps driven by the reviewer thinking they might get a scathing review of their own critical talent from Mozzer. Anyway I haven’t read the book yet which rather interestingly is published by Penguin Classics.

So if I haven’t read the book what is the purpose of this post? Well simply to publicise something that has been published on Tumblr under the title ‘This Charming Charlie’. It is a collection of Charles Schultz‘s Peanutscartoon strips with their original dialogue replaced by Morrissey lyrics. Click here to check it out, but do it quickly because someone (I wonder who, because it certainly doesn’t seem to be Mozzer) is taking a copyright action against Lauren LoPrete’s site.

Before he decided to “Dance, Dance, Dance, (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)” like “Le Freak” that he is, before he confided that he wanted our love and that we were his forbidden lover and before he suggested that “Everybody Dance” did you know what Nile Rodgers the Chicmeister did? well he was a part of soul group New York City whose biggest hit was “I’m Doing Fine Now”. well the job he had that fascinates me the most is that he was having his own “Good Times” as a member of the Sesame Street house band! I wonder if he worked on the show at the same time as Luther Vandross was singing there?